Final Thoughts

NVIDIA has made some big strides in its Maxwell architecture because one year ago we were eyeing down the desktop GM204 part, which became the GeForce GTX 980. Now we're looking at the mobile GTX 980 which is just as powerful, inside of a notebook. Hot damn.

We're looking at desktop GTX 980 performance, enough to handle VR and triple-monitor gaming. It's insane to think where we'll be in a year from now, but I think NVIDIA is only just beginning to scrape the surface of what's capable inside of a small system.

But one thing struck me; NVIDIA had effectively shrunken down its desktop GTX 980 and slapped it onto a much smaller PCB. It has the same performance, the same GDDR5, the same... well... everything. But, it's just insanely small. The engineers over at NVIDIA have to be congratulated on this, as it's a huge achievement.

Something hit me during my trip to LA, though. NVIDIA has done this with GDDR5, and not HBM. AMD was able to shrink a desktop video card by half with HBM on the Fury products and the R9 Nano, but NVIDIA has shrunken it down again, and into a gaming notebook. All the while using the tried and true GDDR5 VRAM. What will NVIDIA be able to achieve with Pascal and HBM2? The future of GPU technology has never been more exciting, folks.

The future for NVIDIA's mobile products is even more exciting. They can now effectively sell gaming notebooks with the same power as desktop gaming PCs, which hasn't been something they've been able to say before. Sure, the GTX 980M mobile GPU was powerful, but it was still 30-40% slower than the faster desktop GTX 980 GPU.

Now NVIDIA can offer VR-capable gaming notebooks, and with the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive right around the corner, NVIDIA has placed itself into a very, very lucrative position. The question is, where is AMD on the mobile front? Even with HBM, AMD is completely incapable of competing with NVIDIA on the mobile GPU world right now, and that should be something worth writing headlines over.

NVIDIA is making huge inroads with mobile gamers, where they now associate gaming notebooks with NVIDIA and not AMD. While NVIDIA secures 82% of the discrete GPU market, it leaves AMD fighting for scraps. Now that NVIDIA virtually dominates the mobile gaming market, AMD - even with its fan dangled HBM technology - simply can't compete.

If you're in the market for a new mobile gaming powerhouse, you're going to want to wait a few weeks to grab one of the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980-powered gaming notebooks.

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